What are some good resources other than google translate to help communicating with locals?

What are some good resources other than google translate to help communicating with locals? - Positive young male engineer sitting at table with woman and working together on project in light room

Soon my girlfriend and I will be traveling around Asia/Oceania for a year and normally before travelling I will learn some of the local language. I have a little bit of a formula of the stuff that I normally learn such as "can I have", greetings, days of the week, numbers 1-100 and a few other things.

With the sheer amount of countries we'll be traveling to (over 13) it's sadly a little unrealistic, my initial thoughts were maybe technology has progressed enough to fill this gap. With google translate I could translate between English/Dutch/French into the local language and then have them read it. While this is nice in certain locations, others such as China and the more remote regions of countries we'll be traveling to this isn't very feasible.

What alternatives do we have or how could we approach this problem so we can better communicate with locals and people during our travels?



Best Answer

Personally, I've found the language learning app Duolingo to be useful for learning the basics of a language. Duolingo (and its many competitors) rely on spaced repetition, meaning it remembers what you got wrong and right and drills down on your weaknesses.

Now I need to emphasize the "basics" here -- you're not going to get anywhere near fluency -- but if you want to learn exactly the kinds of basic greetings, numbers, simple food vocabulary etc that you mention, it hits the spot, and as little as 30 min a day can give a perceptible leg up. It's also quite good for drilling non-Latin scripts if you want to try to learn to read the language as well.




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What can I use instead of Google Translate?

DeepL is one of the best Google Translate alternatives for people who really value accuracy, especially when it comes to grasping context and local idioms. DeepL offers an API that you can use to automatically translate your website, as well as a web interface and apps to translate text content or text files (like .

What are some good translation tools?

5 best machine translation software options in the market
  • Google Translate. Google Translate needs no introduction, being probably the most well-known machine translation software out there. ...
  • DeepL Translator. ...
  • Bing Microsoft Translator. ...
  • SYSTRAN Translate. ...
  • Amazon Translate.


  • What is an alternative to translation?

    List of 8 best alternatives to Google Translate for language conversion.
    • DeepL.
    • Microsoft Translator.
    • iTranslate.
    • Linguee.
    • Baidu Translate.
    • Babylon Translator.
    • Reverso Translation.
    • TripLingo Translator.


    What is the best conversation translator?

    The 8 Best Translation Apps for 2021
  • iTranslate Voice 3. Ever wished for a professional translator without the hefty price tag? ...
  • Google Translate. ...
  • SayHi. ...
  • TextGrabber. ...
  • Microsoft Translator. ...
  • Waygo. ...
  • MyLingo. ...
  • TripLingo.




  • Some Translation Resources - Websites that help you translate




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